Most Compelling Startups and Innovations

The Winners of the 2007 Crunchies award have been revealed. The most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year have been nominated and chosen by the internet community.

• Best Overall: Facebook
• Best technology innovation / achievement: Earthmine
  Earthmine picks up where Google Earth leaves off, bringing deep semantic data to 3D panoramas of the real world. They are indexing reality into 3D maps.
• Best Clean Tech Startup: Tesla Motors
  Tesla’s green sports car has captured the imagination of a public who had come to expect electric cars to be dull are boring.
  
• Best video startup: Hulu
  Hulu put television online. Their mission is to help you find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how you want it.
• Best user-generated content site: Digg
• Best mobile start-up: Twitter
• Best International startup: Netvibes
  
• Best consumer startup: Meebo
  Meebo made instant messaging ubiquitous by bringing it online.
  
• Best enterprise startup: Zoho
  Zoho’s comprehensive online suite of 14 business applications ranging from document editing to CRM continues to lead the way in the move away from desktop computing to working in the cloud.
• Best design: SmugMug
  SmugMug is professional photo site.
  
• Best new gadget/ device: Apple iPhone. See the Apple acceptance speech here.
• Best business model: Zazzle
  Zazzle is an on-demand factory of consumer goods for top brands. It lets consumers become producers by uploading their own images onto that T-shirt, mug, or mousepad and receive a commission on products that they sell and design.
• Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme.
  Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.
• Best Startup Founder: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
• Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)
  
• Best new startup: iMedix
  iMedix combines search and social networking to change the way people find health information online. Users are encouraged to help each other by sharing health experiences and links from around the web.
• Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress)
  The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service. They have just announced 3 GB of free space thanks to hosting on Amazon S3.
  
• Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon
  StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million
• Best time sink site: Kongregate
  CEO Jim Greer describes Kongregate as XBox live for casual games. This site hosts some of the webs most addictive casual games. Remember Desktop Tower Defense?
• Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChose
  DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to connecting classrooms in need with individuals who want to help.

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

I have found this amazon.com review today:

Don't walk, run to your nearest bookstore to read Carr's dazzling THE BIG SWITCH. If you can only read one book in 2008 this should be it. The writing is clean, pure as spring water and thoughtful. Nicholas Carr makes the coming "information utility" simple for the layman to understand. The description of the development of electricity and its impact on society is fascinating and lays the groundwork for the likely outcome of the information age over the next few decades. I enjoyed this book which is a must for anyone interesting in the future of the information utility.

I am looking forward to receiving my copy of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

The Big Switch's full ramifications are still far from clear, but the areas it has touched so far are profoundly changed. We are further along in The Big Switch than most people suspect, and the momentum to continue is unstoppable.

The Big Switch represents a great opportunity for the next wave of internet innovations. In fact utility computing or cloud computing is maturing quickly thanks to Amazon EC2, Google and many others. Let's get ready for a great ride!

2007 Year in Review

2007: What an exciting year in terms of internet innovations!

Let's highlight the most interesting news and trends of last year.


Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ruled the Cloud:

• Amazon SimpleDB - Scalable cloud database completes the AWS suite
  
• Is it time to learn Amazon EC2 and S3
• How to deliver high definition video on the Internet
  
• Internet platforms have been defined
• Amazon EC2, S3 + Hadoop = Open Source Utility Computing
  

3D Virtual Worlds have met the Real World Online:

• Earthmine is indexing reality into 3D Maps
• EveryScape takes the real world online in 3D
• 3D Birds Eye views in Virtual Earth
• Metaplace: Virtual worlds meet the Web
• Street View in Google Maps
  

Devices and gadgets:

• The Apple iPhone starts to disrupt the telecommunications industry
  
• Stunning 3D displays
• Next generation personal displays
• Surface computing has arrived
• The first Terabyte Hard Drive makes personal storage affordable
  

Web 2.0 and Telco 2.0 disruption:

• VoIP phones coming to your browser soon
  
• The War for the next generation mobile consumers intensified
• The Amazon Kindle offers bundled broadband
• Web 2.0 has met Telco 2.0
• Top APIs for Web 2.0 mashups

Hot startups pioneered unbeaten paths:

• Here comes another bubble? (fun video)
• True Knowledge and Powerset explores Natural Language Search
• Peer to peer banking has arrived
  

Earthmine is Indexing Reality into 3D Maps

Earthmine is a street-level, 3D mapping company that is focused on indexing reality. Their geospatial data mine of urban environments is an order of magnitude more detailed and accurate than anything before. Earthmine's new kind of map is a geospatially accurate model of the world that is accessed through an intuitive panoramic interface.

Google Maps Street View and Everyscape offers similar immersive visual experience. However every pixel in each high quality Earthmine image has highly accurate latitude, longitude and elevation data. This provides a unique three-dimensional context to existing spatial data not offered by others.

Check out this amazing Earthmine demo video:



Earthmine has vehicles with a calibrated camera array, collecting highly accurate and detailed data at the street level using technology licensed from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This data is processed into a form that is deliverable over the internet as a subscription service to their customer base. Their highly scalable data collection and processing technology is highly scalable allows entire municipalities to be captured in weeks.

Earthmine will offer the first street-level geospatial platform for urban environments in early 2008. Their framework includes

• a pre-collected base data layer of 3D panoramic images tagged with 3D location data
• a set of web-based professional tools to gather, analyze and visualize street-level location-based information

This geo-spatial framework will integrate into any web application, act as the foundation for layers of geo-tagged meta-data, and connect with existing systems and applications.

AIR iPhone on your Desktop Powered by Ribbit

Get a fully-functional iPhone on your desktop that enables users to make and take calls on your computer. The innovative AIR iPhone developed on the Ribbit API using Adobe AIR technology makes this a reality. Users can make outbound calls to any type of phone; landline, mobile or online phone. They can also receive incoming calls and voice messages from any phone networks.

The AIR iPhone was developed by Joe Johnston of Knoware. Check it out here.


My earlier post describes the Ribbit API which enables VoIP phone calls directly from the browser. The Ribbit Developer Platform has just been released so developers can access it by signing up for an account.

Ribbit's open API enables developers to integrate voice 2.0 communications into web sites, communities and applications. A great example is Ribbit for Salesforce which links mobile voice communication to Salesforce.com. Mobile calls, voice messages and text transcriptions automatically flow into Salesforce, so users can play, read, store, search, and act on voice communications right inside their customer relationship management (CRM) web environment.

Amazon SimpleDB - Scalable Cloud Database

Amazon has announced the limited beta of Amazon SimpleDB - a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Together with the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other web services Amazon offers a complete utility computing platform. SimpleDB was the missing piece of AWS - the scalable structured database.

Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data like:

• CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
• GET, PUT or DELETE items with attribute-value pairs
• QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators

Users pay only for the resources that they consume. Pricing is based on

• Machine Utilization
  $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed
  (normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor)
• Data Transfer
  $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
  $0.13-$0.18 per GB - data transfer out
• Structured Data Storage
  $1.50 per GB-month
  

Get started today with the Amazon SimpleDB Guide.

Many companies already use Amazon Web Services as their utility computing infrastructure like finalists of the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge:

• Ooyala - a platform to deliver video content for publishers
• Brainscape - an engine for measuring the networks in the brain
• Commerce360 - optimize paid search campaigns to deliver improved campaign efficiency
• Justin.tv - a massively scalable live video platform
• MileMeter - “auto insurance buy the mile”
• UserTesting.com - quick and cheap website usability testing
• WeoGeo - a one-stop marketplace for mapping

With the introduction of Amazon SimpleDB utility computing just got even better!

Here Comes Another Bubble Video

Are we riding the Web 2.0 bubble? For some fun (or reality check) enjoy this video by The Richter Scales:



Got me a CS degree
Honor roll, MIT
Moved to Palo Alto
Opportunity knocked

Thought I have the perfect plan
Took a job at webvan
Traded in my twenties
For a worthless pile of tech stocks

Suffered through the market crash
Lost a giant wad of cash
Pink slips, burger flips
Would you like some fries?

Happy days are here again
Larry Page, Sergey Brin
Time to write a business plan
So I can be like those guys!

Here comes another bubble
It's a monster rally
All around the valley

First you need a buzzword
Then a second and a third
Pick at least two industries
You'll revolutionize

Find yourself and engineer
Feed him pizza, buy him beer
Give him just a fraction
Of a fraction of the pie

Need a good domain name
Must be cheap, can't be lame
Something cool like
Flickr, meebo, wikiyou, mahalo, bebo

"telephone" without the "t"
"digg" but with a triple "g"
Make your elevator pitch
Code it up and flip the switch

Here comes another bubble
The VCs are backing
Baby let's get cracking

and so on ...